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TomViolence posted:The American situation seems to be somewhat unique due to the historical lack of a strong socialist tendency in political life, and slavery and segregation's long hangover poisoning the well in terms of race relations. That's not to say Blighty or France or Germany haven't their own issues along similar lines, but things like the Southern Strategy and McCarthyism really seem to have done a number on the US's political landscape. This does seem to be a problem that has significantly shrunk with the younger generation. See: Sanders popularity across all demographics under 30. The Cold War is dead, most people are growing up in urban areas, and the South is less like "the other half of Amerca" and is just simply another region.
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Sep 11, 2016 19:53
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TomViolence posted:The American situation seems to be somewhat unique due to the historical lack of a strong socialist tendency in political life, and slavery and segregation's long hangover poisoning the well in terms of race relations. There was a very strong socialist tendency in political life in the first quarter to half of the 20th Century. These same tendencies, completely coincidentally I assume, also tracked with white nationalists. computer parts fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 20:25
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Probably because the academic left are insulated from the effects of the policies they push. Desegregation sounds good on paper because rich white liberals aren't living in neighborhoods that minorities can afford. For white working class people who are just as racist if not more they're seeing it as liberals greenlighting an invasion of their neighborhoods. Note that even in rich liberal places like Palo Alto when there are too many Asian people living there the liberals fled just like working class white people did in the 60s and 70s. Additionally, desegregating the working class workforce is another sore spot for them because the commanding heights of public service, the media, and other "liberal" white collar professions still gate minorities out through poo poo like crony hiring and making hopefuls run a gauntlet of unpaid internships. Meanwhile there are no gates keeping poor minorities from competing with poor whites for low paying service sector or manufacturing jobs.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:45
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computer parts posted:There was a very strong socialist tendency in political life in the first quarter to half of the 20th Century. The socialist parties back in the 20th century were strong pushers for integration of unions. Many black liberation organizations were strongly influenced by (and sometimes identified outright as) socialist parties.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:51
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AShamefulDisplay posted:Many black liberation organizations were strongly influenced by (and sometimes identified outright as) socialist parties. You should read Invisible Man.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:52
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We need to find a way to educate the white working class. I can't speak for Britain, but in America having them work in the fields and be inspired by the virtue of the migrant laborer might improve their lot.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:53
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Peven Stan posted:Probably because the academic left are insulated from the effects of the policies they push. Desegregation sounds good on paper because rich white liberals aren't living in neighborhoods that minorities can afford. For white working class people who are just as racist if not more they're seeing it as liberals greenlighting an invasion of their neighborhoods the fact that the average wage and standard of living hasn't risen for 40 years for the working class is not something you can say this and omit. The academic left aren't insulated. They're ignored. Pretending that making GBS threads on the working class and telling them it's migrants is less relevant than "white people are just racist" makes you an idiot.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:56
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The perspective seems to be that the problem Ocrassus is trying to describe is structured differently in different parts of the world. While the US and the UK might be suffering from the same economic problems created by neoliberalism and globalization, each country requires a different path to a solution due to how their politics are historically structured. Race is a construct essential to understanding problems in the US, but not class. Class is a construct essential to understanding problems in the UK, but not race. It's important not to mix the two. So too is it different in Canada. Because of what is currently our three-party system, "reconciling" the academic left with the working class seems like a strange thing to do. The reason being is that our academic left is split into what seem like two factions: those who are already reconciled with the working class, have been for some time, usually embedded at smaller-town universities, don't have much access to mass media, with economic trends suggesting they themselves will eventually be on working class level as the prospects within the academy worsen; and the other ones embedded at large cities within Ontario, who have access to the mass media that comes with being in those large cities, are considered part of the historical "Laurentian Consensus", already come from money, still cosign to neoliberalism, and have no reason to stop. But while that description might describe the Laurentians as the 1% rich who must be eaten, I at least understand why they function the way they do. The characteristic focus of theirs on social progressivism while still using conservative economics comes from a very particular place. From 1960 and onwards, they focused heavily on enforcing multiculturalism as a Canadian value purely because of what would happen if they didn't. Minority rights and language rights became a huge issue when Silent Revolution Quebec didn't really have a good seat at the table during the repatriation of the constitution, leading to various sovereignist referenda and terrorist movements in response. If multiculturalism wasn't there, we likely would've lost confederation and gotten balkanized in the process. Minority rights saved our sorry asses. Combine that with a narrowly dodged national debt crisis in the 1990's that was roughly analogous to what Greece recently did not dodge, and the fashionable-social-progressive/neoliberal-economic-oppression is more or less the only thing the Canadian Liberals are good at. Can't fault them for it, even if NAFTA was still a knife in the back. (And the National Energy Policy too, if you want to go further back than that.) The problem is what comes now. The liberals haven't lost the same amount of face as their counterparts in the rest of the world because they avoided getting involved in the Iraq War. They're still on top of things and, barring some form of nationwide economic collapse we're due for literally any moment now, there's not much to really stop them. The Conservatives and Old Tories are different in their own ways, but they still consign to neoliberalism as well. They even got the ball rolling with the Canadian Reagan/Bush/Thatcher equivalent. Even the labour-oriented NDP revoked their old socialist routes because thought they had to submit to neoliberalism or else there was no way to win an election. The status quo continues to worsen, but the necessary economic shocks that other countries experienced in order to start rebelling against neoliberalism haven't happened here yet; some regional/generational stuff, but nothing major enough to involve a majority of Canadians.
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Sep 11, 2016 21:02
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A Buttery Pastry posted:There's no need to put "betraying their voters" in quotation marks, that is definitely what Third Way social democrats did. I feel there is a need for the quotation marks, given the fact that the "betrayal" happened a decade or three after those voters largely abandoned the left for the far right. The New Democrats are a direct result of too many New Deal Democrats abandoning the party over civil rights. If those voters had been able to accept the civil rights movement (a big if), then the third-way never happens. In that case, all US national politics from like the 70's onward looks so radically different its hard to even speculate on.
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Sep 11, 2016 21:05
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Morroque posted:The perspective seems to be that the problem Ocrassus is trying to describe is structured differently in different parts of the world. While the US and the UK might be suffering from the same economic problems created by neoliberalism and globalization, each country requires a different path to a solution due to how their politics are historically structured. Race is a construct essential to understanding problems in the US, but not class. Class is a construct essential to understanding problems in the UK, but not race. It's important not to mix the two. I really dislike when people say this. In America it's both class and race. It isn't an "either or" scenario. This is precisely why the left in America has been extremely weak over the past thirty years, particularly when it comes to economics.
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Sep 11, 2016 21:15
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The idea that class issues don't exist in the USA are a myth. They might be less apparent because, contrarily to the English, you don't really have different accents according to class. The proportion of nouveaux riches vs. old money is much more in the former's favor in the USA and in the latter's favor in Britain. But just look at how expensive it is to go to university -- why do you think it is so? The answer is simple: university is really expensive so that the poor are kept out as much as possible, so that only the sons and daughters of the rich can get an education that will allow them to get the kind of job that makes one rich. Policies aiming at preventing free college tuition for all students are entirely class-motivated.
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Sep 11, 2016 21:25
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computer parts posted:For some reason there's a need to qualify that it's the white working class in particular that has issues. I would say the problem lies in the tendency of certain sectors of the identitarian left to downplay or ignore class issues as a legitimate basis for political identity, as opposed to gender/race/sexual identity. Of course, they make the same accusation in reverse, but I think it's pretty clear the identitarians are in much greater favor in the halls of power currently, and their demands are much easier and more likely to be met by the political establishment. That's not necessarily the fault of those groups, but it's still true icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 21:50
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computer parts posted:You should read Invisible Man. If I recall correctly, the Brotherhood was a stand in for the Communist Party. What does that have to do with what you quoted?
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Sep 11, 2016 21:50
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:I feel there is a need for the quotation marks, given the fact that the "betrayal" happened a decade or three after those voters largely abandoned the left for the far right. The New Democrats are a direct result of too many New Deal Democrats abandoning the party over civil rights. If those voters had been able to accept the civil rights movement (a big if), then the third-way never happens. In that case, all US national politics from like the 70's onward looks so radically different its hard to even speculate on. One of the factors people tend to ignore about white Southerners switching to the Republican Party is that it was triggered in significant part by large numbers of white people in the South achieving middle class status, which they had not had before. The Republican Party, of course, being the party of the middle class as opposed to the working class. Their advancement to middle class status was enabled by the Dixiecrat bargain of weak social democracy for whites and apartheid for blacks, but the circumstances leading to the creation of that bargain were also more complicated than is usually portrayed. The prewar populist and labor movements in the South whose agitation led to its creation were not particularly in favor of Jim Crow, and in many cases actually tried to break that system and organize blacks alongside whites, because leaving blacks out of the bargain would obviously severely undercut that bargain. In the end what happened was the Southern political and economic establishment basically cut a deal whereby you got that system of weak social democracy with blacks disenfranchised, to avoid giving strong social democracy to everyone. That doesn't mean the white working class weren't racist, but it does mean it was a lot more complicated than just them being racists, and that at least before the postwar Dixiecrat order was solidified, they were maybe not as racist as you might think For reading I recommend Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America https://www.amazon.com/Populist-Moment-History-Agrarian-America/dp/0195024176 icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 22:01
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Morroque posted:The perspective seems to be that the problem Ocrassus is trying to describe is structured differently in different parts of the world. While the US and the UK might be suffering from the same economic problems created by neoliberalism and globalization, each country requires a different path to a solution due to how their politics are historically structured. Race is a construct essential to understanding problems in the US, but not class. Class is a construct essential to understanding problems in the UK, but not race. It's important not to mix the two. Race is class, the whole point of class is that it can be universally applied to context. While American class is dominated by race and gender issues, those are still categories of class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwvMNkCruGw I feel this is relevant
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Sep 11, 2016 22:22
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:I feel there is a need for the quotation marks, given the fact that the "betrayal" happened a decade or three after those voters largely abandoned the left for the far right. The New Democrats are a direct result of too many New Deal Democrats abandoning the party over civil rights. If those voters had been able to accept the civil rights movement (a big if), then the third-way never happens. In that case, all US national politics from like the 70's onward looks so radically different its hard to even speculate on. New Deal Democrats didn't all simply leave the Democrat Party, a number were forced out as Social Liberal Democrats started taking over leadership positions in the late 50s and early 60s. In the 50s a new generation of Democrats who were more skeptical of government programs were coming into power, whose language ironically the new conservatives (National Review-type folks) stole and turned into an argument for doing away with government programs all together. Peter Stan posted:Probably because the academic left are insulated from the effects of the policies they push. Desegregation sounds good on paper because rich white liberals aren't living in neighborhoods that minorities can afford. For white working class people who are just as racist if not more they're seeing it as liberals greenlighting an invasion of their neighborhoods. Note that even in rich liberal places like Palo Alto when there are too many Asian people living there the liberals fled just like working class white people did in the 60s and 70s. Pretty accurate. The White working class, especially northern ethnic enclaves (think your Slavic Villages of Cleveland, Little Italies or Hungaries) were the first neighborhoods that African-Americans could move up to, and the white working class of those areas did not want that happening both for racist reasons and for maintaining their little slice of ethnicity. MLK jr. said that he experienced far more virulence in Chicago than he had in the South. White liberals meanwhile wrote off the white working class as hopelessly racist, and turned to focus on other social and moral issues. Republicans then swept in to pick up the broken pieces. Busing is another example of a stark divide between white liberals, who always had the option of sending their kids to private schools or schools in neighborhoods that were much too expensive for African-American families to live in, and white working class, who responded to having their kids bused miles away from home when a neighborhood school was just around the corner, by moving to the cheaper suburbs/sending their kids to private schools, which crushed a number of major city public school systems by denying them property taxes and pupils. Was integrating schools a noble and sought-after goal? Sure, but white liberals didn't have to suffer the consequences of their policies, and wrote off any grumblings by working-class whites as purely the symptoms of racism. Is racism certainly a factor in white working-class populations? Of course it is, but social progress is not a painless process, and when you ignore some of the valid concerns of people who might be racist, they turn their back on you.
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Sep 11, 2016 22:34
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computer parts posted:There was a very strong socialist tendency in political life in the first quarter to half of the 20th Century. The fact that the particular institutional configuration of labor in the USA in the postwar period was racist, doesn't mean either that the socialist movements at the time were racist, or that all socialist movements or institutional configurations of labor in general across time and space, are racist. There seems to be a strong impetus among certain sectors of the left to make that case though icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 22:53
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icantfindaname posted:One of the factors people tend to ignore about white Southerners switching to the Republican Party is that it was triggered in significant part by large numbers of white people in the South achieving middle class status, which they had not had before. The Republican Party, of course, being the party of the middle class as opposed to the working class. Their advancement to middle class status was enabled by the Dixiecrat bargain of weak social democracy for whites and apartheid for blacks, but the circumstances leading to the creation of that bargain were also more complicated than is usually portrayed. The prewar populist and labor movements in the South whose agitation led to its creation were not particularly in favor of Jim Crow, and in many cases actually tried to break that system and organize blacks alongside whites, because leaving blacks out of the bargain would obviously severely undercut that bargain. In the end what happened was the Southern political and economic establishment basically cut a deal whereby you got that system of weak social democracy with blacks disenfranchised, to avoid giving strong social democracy to everyone. That doesn't mean the white working class weren't racist, but it does mean it was a lot more complicated than just them being racists, and that at least before the postwar Dixiecrat order was solidified, they were maybe not as racist as you might think This is also true. It is no coincidence that the first generation who were raised not being poor or in poverty swung to the right. Despite what many liberals and establishment Dems will tell you, things aren't as simple as "Lol the whites are racist so they went Republican.  ". It's more complicated than that.Spangly A posted:Race is class, the whole point of class is that it can be universally applied to context. While American class is dominated by race and gender issues, those are still categories of class. I love this.
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Sep 11, 2016 23:02
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punk rebel ecks posted:I really dislike when people say this. In America it's both class and race. It isn't an "either or" scenario. This is precisely why the left in America has been extremely weak over the past thirty years, particularly when it comes to economics. Cat Mattress posted:The idea that class issues don't exist in the USA are a myth. They might be less apparent because, contrarily to the English, you don't really have different accents according to class. The proportion of nouveaux riches vs. old money is much more in the former's favor in the USA and in the latter's favor in Britain. But just look at how expensive it is to go to university -- why do you think it is so? The answer is simple: university is really expensive so that the poor are kept out as much as possible, so that only the sons and daughters of the rich can get an education that will allow them to get the kind of job that makes one rich. Policies aiming at preventing free college tuition for all students are entirely class-motivated. Pretty much. I'm a white guy from a poor background (single mom with her own issues, absent dad, raised on welfare, food stamps, Section 8, all that happy stuff), and even if my skin gives me certain privileges relative to other minorities in the same strata as me, it doesn't mean that I'm part of the monolith of "white society" or culture or whatever. It's maybe intangible and hard to pinpoint, but I guess it's as if middle-class people don't understand or accept that I'm not necessarily any different from a poor black or Latino or Asian person. That the poverty and family situation I grew up in (despite being superficially "white" in terms of skin color) didn't make me any more capable of getting a good job, of feeling like I fit in to their socioeconomic culture, of feeling like an accepted member of their level of society. It didn't stop me from feeling the depression and existential hopelessness that marks members of other lower-income ethnic and racial groups, or of making unfavorable comparisons with what I see in the media (what should be, what is "normal", essentially) relative to my own status, leading to self-loathing and self-hatred because I somehow didn't measure up or see myself reflected in it. Or that somehow I don't know what it's like to trade unfulfilled yearning for bitterness and then want to give up, because I'm somehow abnormal and broken and not really a person. These are problems that I'm still coping with today; it's not as if "BUT THEN I GOT BETTER!" - even having recently graduated from university and gotten some therapeutic counseling and medication from the school, I'm still unsure of how to effectively leverage myself, still scared and hesitant that I won't get a chance because while I have white skin, I don't have middle-class looks or mannerisms or connections and I'll be relegated to the degreed but low-wage labor pool. But it's not that my circumstance (or that of other white people like me) is worse than or even equal to that of many non-white minorities; it could have been a lot worse for me growing up, and it could be a lot worse now. But it's a matter of degree of the immutable fact that even if I'm only waist-deep in the poo poo, while others are neck-deep, we're all in the same poo poo pit. It's why I identify as progressive, want progressive social and economic policies, and abhor racism because it's a cruel and inhuman means of acting, and it's a means of dividing us against each other when we should be uniting. I want everyone to be able to get out of the poo poo trap of poverty, despair, and hopelessness. How many self-identified progressive middle-class whites really understand this sort of mental and personality dynamic, formed by social circumstance, despite their claims that they do? I'd contend that many don't; after all, a glass ceiling can also be a glass floor for the people above it, still distancing them from the grim reality and muffling the cries of those below it even if they see it all. It can feel as if the academics, the professionals, and the legislators all think that by merely raising awareness and tossing a few token policies out there, they've done their duty and laid out the groundwork to fix the social ills afflicting America. I don't know the exact demographic breakdowns, but it would probably be safe to assume those three groups are overwhelmingly white. And yet, if they can't seem to understand or appreciate the pain of people who (by their own claims) share some commonality with them (poor whites), what are the odds that they really have any understanding or appreciation for the struggles of non-white groups either except in the most patronizing or shallow manner? And in writing off poor whites as racist and unreachable, it's really not that different from writing off poor blacks as lazy/shiftless/mentally feeble. In either case, one is categorizing a group as mentally incapable of changing for the better, of being unworthy of regard because it's "not worth the effort" to try and change those categorizations. They've already been categorized one way, so it's an immutable fact, man! And I think that's the main issue with the academic left, today - they've become soft and complacent, writing endless analyses of social causes and legacies (which are important), but they're not willing to challenge the system itself. They've become bourgeois and decadent lotus-eating navel-gazers, in love with their own worldview that reflects reality by proxy, and only at the angles they wish it do so.
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Sep 12, 2016 00:46
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quote:Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition
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Sep 12, 2016 00:47
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Cat Mattress posted:The idea that class issues don't exist in the USA are a myth. They might be less apparent because, contrarily to the English, you don't really have different accents according to class. The proportion of nouveaux riches vs. old money is much more in the former's favor in the USA and in the latter's favor in Britain. But just look at how expensive it is to go to university -- why do you think it is so? Same reason US healthcare is so expensive: because most people don't pay the full sticker price out of their own pocket, and therefore there's no incentive to keep the sticker price affordable.
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Sep 12, 2016 01:07
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Both the British (accent) and American (income) definitions of class are not really good models of what is going on. You really need to look at assets, and in particular the ratio of income to assets. Enthusiastic Trump/Brexit voters are very rarely in the true working class area of the graph;,low income minimal assets. They are much more likely to be moderate assets, minimal income. Which is what give them a whole different self-interest from the typical liberal middle class, who have higher potential income, but assets only proportionate to that. Because the T/B's have no way of replenishing what they have, taxes, inflation, stock market crashes are all existential threats. As much, or more so, they are to the wealthy, and the rich. Which is what makes available a vast river of money to develop and elaborate a whole ideology of racism and post-racism to support that coincidence of interests. The US left is largely doing ok because the demographics of that model of race are shifting in their favor. This mostly avoids any need to seriously look at reforms that would benefit the actual working class, splitting it off from the T/B's. The UK left doesn't have that luxury.
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Sep 12, 2016 02:08
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Maybe working class whites stopped caring about the left because they constantly label them as racist and started caring more about indentity politics and other bullshit
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Sep 12, 2016 02:24
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Stuff. The thing that pretty much everyone in the political world misunderstands is that minorities simply want the same thing everyone else does. Sure there is much more support for greater civil rights legislation, but that's about it and it comes to varying degrees. The fact of the matter is that minorities simply want the same thing whites want: more income, better schools, safer communities, more jobs, etc. Sure things like affirmative action and/or immigration are very important as well, but they are more so just extra flames that are lit rather than being the dominant force. Hell, the most important issues to Hispanics isn't immigration but in fact education. In fact, immigration is only around as important to most Hispanics as the wars in the Middle East are. Think about that for a second. Something that is dismissed as "lol stupid naive hippie college kid" concern is as around as important to Hispanics as immigration. This is a key reason why I feel that the left as well as Democrats have a difficult time getting minorities to vote, because even they don't know what really concerns them.' At times I feel that the sects of the Left aren't too much better at the Right when it comes to viewing minorities at the polls. These primaries were a great example of that. The Left (i.e. Sanders supporters) pinned the minority vote on pushing for police brutality and the general income inequality message. While the center left (i.e. HIllary supporters) continued traditional Democrats of advertising all messages equally. In the end the center left comfortably won which led to a few (which in turn is most SA members) stating that minorities reject the Left due to Socialism being "a white thing" and that unless race relations are at the absolute forefront of everything then minorities don't like it. In reality the difference was solely due to a generation gap, as most minorities thirty and younger preferred the Left's rhetoric, even black voters. From my heresy as a minority I would say this is due to a variety of reasons, but none of them would be "because minorities don't care too much about income inequality" or "because race relations weren't brought to the absolute forefront" as polls show that even for blacks income is their primary concern, even above racial issues. Of course this doesn't mean racial issues aren't important, they absolutely are, they just aren't the end all be all. At the end of the day we are all much more similar than most politicians and political fanatics believe we are, and it ends up getting in the way of a lot of progress. radmonger posted:The US left is largely doing ok because the demographics of that model of race are shifting in their favor. This mostly avoids any need to seriously look at reforms that would benefit the actual working class, splitting it off from the T/B's. This is something that is definitely optimistic for Americans. If the country manages to reform to a more proportional representation of the House, then the nation has an opportunity* for a Left wing Golden Age. *Keyword. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 02:24
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punk rebel ecks posted:At times I feel that the sects of the Left aren't too much better at the Right when it comes to viewing minorities at the polls. These primaries were a great example of that. The Left (i.e. Sanders supporters) pinned the minority vote on pushing for police brutality and the general income inequality message. While the center left (i.e. HIllary supporters) continued traditional Democrats of advertising all messages equally. In the end the center left comfortably won which led to a few (which in turn is most SA members) stating that minorities reject the Left due to Socialism being "a white thing" and that unless race relations are at the absolute forefront of everything then minorities don't like it. In reality the difference was solely due to a generation gap, as most minorities thirty and younger preferred the Left's rhetoric, even black voters. From my heresy as a minority I would say this is due to a variety of reasons, but none of them would be "because minorities don't care too much about income inequality" or "because race relations weren't brought to the absolute forefront" as polls show that even for blacks income is their primary concern, even above racial issues. Of course this doesn't mean racial issues aren't important, they absolutely are, they just aren't the end all be all. At the end of the day we are all much more similar than most politicians and political fanatics believe we are, and it ends up getting in the way of a lot of progress. Could you describe what you mean by the "the difference was solely due to a generation gap?" Because from what I remember, knowing whether a voter was white or non-white was a bit more predictive of whether or not they'd vote for Clinton or Sanders than knowing which side of 30 they were on.
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Sep 12, 2016 02:59
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icantfindaname posted:I would say the problem lies in the tendency of certain sectors of the identitarian left to downplay or ignore class issues as a legitimate basis for political identity, as opposed to gender/race/sexual identity. Of course, they make the same accusation in reverse, but I think it's pretty clear the identitarians are in much greater favor in the halls of power currently, and their demands are much easier and more likely to be met by the political establishment. That's not necessarily the fault of those groups, but it's still true Class can be a legitimate basis of identity, it's just that historically it doesn't work unless there's some other basis to work off of (most commonly race). This is true outside of the US as well, like how the USSR maintained itself through the promotion of Russian culture. also: lol at Identitarian, you may as well say "Cultural Marxism". AShamefulDisplay posted:If I recall correctly, the Brotherhood was a stand in for the Communist Party. What does that have to do with what you quoted? The ending of the book.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:10
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computer parts posted:For working class whites (the ones you want to chase), the underlying motivation has been white nationalism. This hasn't changed versus 100 years ago when they were in favor of massive expansions of social programs. These two sentences don't make sense put together. Racism and xenophobia are tools the elites and middle class use to divide the working class and/or justify their own social status. Lower class and working class whites have desired some semblance of equality. The only thing that has changed, with the death of labor unions and the rise of global capitalism, is now they're now increasingly forced into obscurity while the bourgeois, like Donald Trump, pretend to be their mouthpieces. computer parts posted:This is true outside of the US as well, like how the USSR maintained itself through the promotion of Russian culture. This is ahistorical bullshit.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:26
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:These two sentences don't make sense put together. Racism and xenophobia are tools the elites and middle class use to divide the working class and/or justify their own social status. What if it's not just that?
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Sep 12, 2016 03:33
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moebius2778 posted:Could you describe what you mean by the "the difference was solely due to a generation gap?" Because from what I remember, knowing whether a voter was white or non-white was a bit more predictive of whether or not they'd vote for Clinton or Sanders than knowing which side of 30 they were on. That most minorities under 30 voted for Sanders while most minorities over 30 didn't. Hence an age gap between minority voter preferences. I even linked an article that featured exit polls to it.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:37
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Ocrassus posted:Right. But Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. And Bernie Sanders in the US represented genuine moves to the left on a number of issues. So what went wrong? Why were/are they not seeing much success? Compare the Democratic platform this year to four years ago. Sanders managed a significant shift to the left for the party, especially on economic issues, even if he did not make the nomination.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:41
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computer parts posted:What if it's not just that? Most of it is. The middle and upper class whites are far more likely to have racist beliefs and influence racist policies. This is why racist language in this country is full of buzzwords that also imply poverty. Ocrassus posted:Right. But Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. And Bernie Sanders in the US represented genuine moves to the left on a number of issues. So what went wrong? Why were/are they not seeing much success? I think Corbyn has had a lot more success than Sanders had. Look at the old guard in the Labour tragically fumble over themselves trying to oust him.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:42
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Liquid Communism posted:Compare the Democratic platform this year to four years ago. Sanders managed a significant shift to the left for the party, especially on economic issues, even if he did not make the nomination. Arguably the most influential runner up in a primary for the party in decades. Particularly because his messages hit the youth the most. Dead Cosmonaut posted:I think Corbyn has had a lot more success than Sanders had. Look at the old guard in the Labour tragically fumble over themselves trying to oust him. I'm not too familiar with Corbyn and his success in the U.K. I'd like to know more.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:44
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punk rebel ecks posted:The Cold War is dead, most people are growing up in urban areas, and the South is less like "the other half of Amerca" and is just simply another region. Bernie might be marking a rhetorical shift but that's very different from a policy shift. punk rebel ecks posted:If the country manages to reform to a more proportional representation of the House, then the nation has an opportunity* for a Left wing Golden Age. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 03:50
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:Most of it is. The middle and upper class whites are far more likely to have racist beliefs How do you know this?
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Sep 12, 2016 03:51
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computer parts posted:How do you know this?  % voters = % white voters
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Sep 12, 2016 03:59
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OneEightHundred posted:Bernie might be marking a rhetorical shift but that's very different from a policy shift. A single year, much less an election year, in the spotlight is not going to shift policy immediately. Hell, President Obama's been trying to shift policy for eight years with marginal success due to the nature of our last few sessions of Congress.
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Sep 12, 2016 03:59
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computer parts posted:
gently caress off dude, we can address being poor without having to be black or making every hot take about being black . Even though being black has unique and particular challenges that also have a lot in common with being loving poor, you could actually talk about poo poo instead of sniping from the side for I know this post makes me a KKK Super Hitler-Cyclops but poo poo, the dude you are mocking actually made a good case for poor whites and why they might not be anything but a caricature for certain centrist views.
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Sep 12, 2016 04:04
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I'm going to challenge the assumption of the OP and say that it's not the academic left that needs to be reconciled here. The politics of today can be subdivided into 4 separate groups, each with it's own ideological perspective - left, right, and two separate forms of neoliberalism.The right are the racists/tribalists/reactionary, the left is the academics/radical, but neither of them have any real political clout. It's the two forms of neoliberalism that constitute the valid political spectrum today, which both emphasize market-based solutions and limited government regulation, as well as other 'business friendly' politics, like low taxes on the rich. The difference between the two kinds of neoliberals are the degree of faith in that dogma, and the other social polities they follow to remain in power - typically racial politics, but also other social-wedge issues like abortion. Neither party cares about any workers, or 'worker interests' taken as a whole, because neither has any incentive to do so. But, if you're a minority, you're obviously going to back the side that offers you something, in terms of the protection of your rights. Similar logic applies for the right-neoliberal, but opposite since it's social conservatives/white/racist. So the question of 'why do white workers not vote left-neoliberal' is 'because they have no self-interest in doing so'. Why don't they vote left? Because the left has no political presence and no realistic chance of short-term gains. Why doesn't the left have presence/clout? Pessimism in the vision of the left, as expressed in the belief that There Is No Alternative, and a historically new weakness in organized labor, which leads to both lack of material and manpower. There are still plenty of racists though, so naturally the tribalists are able to assert themselves against the right-neoliberals, as expressed in the Trump campaign. But Third Way Dems have no incentive to cater to worker interests, as a whole, because they don't represent workers, they represent one faction of the managerial class. That's why they're left-neoliberal. They are engaged in a fight with the other faction of the managerial class, through electoral politics. That's it. No reconciliation is possible, because there is no interest in reconciliation.
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Sep 12, 2016 04:06
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OneEightHundred posted:Bernie might be marking a rhetorical shift but that's very different from a policy shift. This is very true. OneEightHundred posted:The House is hosed unless the Supreme Court makes some sort of major ruling against gerrymandering. Until that happens, House representation is going to be decided every 10 years by the state governments, and the state governments themselves are being rigged to maintain their current composition, so good luck with that. Gerrymandering is an issue but it isn't even the biggest one. The issue is that most of the Democratic voters are in cities which are vastly under-represented in the house. Until proportional population voting is past, the Dems are hosed in the House. Unfortunately the Dems haven't been touching this topic with a ten foot poll. At least when it comes to mainstream politics. To me the structure of the political system is the biggest thing in the country that needs reform. More so than even economic and racial policies.
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Sep 12, 2016 04:07
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| # ? May 11, 2024 06:35 |
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Grognan posted:gently caress off dude, we can address being poor without having to be black or making every hot take about being black . Even though being black has unique and particular challenges that also have a lot in common with being loving poor, you could actually talk about poo poo instead of sniping from the side for I am talking about poo poo. Poor whites don't support progressive measures anymore because they're racist. That was the reason why they did support progressive measures way back in the day, because it didn't apply to non-whites. You're the one desperately trying to find any other reason other than that. Which you can't, because for some strange reason poor minorities still support progressive measures, so it's not an issue of poverty. It's an issue of privilege. Dead Cosmonaut posted:
Considering Democrats were the Party of the Klan until the mid 60s, this doesn't really say what you think it does. computer parts fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 04:07
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